Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  A third reliable method of selling papers was through a light and rather innocent willingness to gossip and scandalmonger. In his first Busy-Body essay for Bradford, Franklin had defended the value of nosiness and tattling. Now that he had his own paper, he made it clear that the Gazette was pleased, indeed proud, to continue this service. Using the same tone as the Busy-Body, Franklin wrote an anonymous letter to his paper defending gossip, backbiting, and censure “by showing its usefulness and the great good it does to society.

  “It is frequently the means of preventing powerful, politic, ill-designing men from growing too popular,” he wrote. “All-examining Censure, with her hundred eyes and her thousand tongues, soon discovers and as speedily divulges in all quarters every least crime or foible that is part of their true character. This clips the wings of their ambition.” Gossip can also, he noted, promote virtue, as some people are motivated more by fear of public humiliation than they are by inner moral principles. “‘What will the world say of me if I act thus?’ is often a reflection strong enough to enable us to resist the most powerful temptation to vice or folly. This preserves the integrity of the wavering, the honesty of the covetous, the sanctity of some of the religious, and the chastity of all virgins.”

  It is amusing that Franklin, though he was willing to impugn the innate resolve of “all” virgins, protected himself by impugning only “some” religious people. In addition, he showed a somewhat cynical side by implying that most people act virtuously not because of an inner goodness, but because they are afraid of public censure.19

  The following week Franklin defended the value of gossip in another letter, even more flavorful, purportedly penned by the aptly named Alice Addertongue. Franklin, who was then 26, had his fictional Alice identify herself, with an edge of irony, as a “young girl of about thirty-five.” She lived at home with her mother and, she said, “find it my duty as well as inclination to exercise my talent at censure for the good of my country folks.”

  After taking a swipe at a “silly” piece in Bradford’s Mercury that criticized women for being gossipy, Alice recounts how she once found herself at odds with her mother on this issue. “She argued that scandal spoiled all good conversation, and I insisted without it there could be no such thing.” As a result, she was banished to the kitchen when visitors came for tea. While her mother engaged guests in high-minded discourse in the parlor, Alice regaled a few young friends with tales of a neighbor’s intrigue with his maid. Hearing the laughter, her mother’s friends began drifting from the parlor into the kitchen to partake in the gossip. Her mother finally joined them. “I have long thought that if you would make your paper a vehicle of scandal, you would double the number of your subscribers.”

  Franklin’s playful defenses of busybodies, among the most amusing pieces he ever wrote, set a lighthearted tone for his paper. Because of his gregarious personality and fascination with human nature, he appreciated tales about people’s foibles and behavior, and he understood why others did as well. But he was, of course, only half-serious in his defense of gossip. The other part of his personality was more earnest: he continually resolved to speak ill of nobody. As a result, he toyed in the Gazette with the argument for gossip, but he did not really indulge in it much. For example, in one issue he noted that he had gotten a letter describing the disagreements and conduct of a certain couple, “but for charitable reasons the said letter is at present thought not fit to be published.”20

  Likewise, he was ambiguous when writing about drinking. He was a temperate man who nevertheless enjoyed the joviality of taverns. In one famous Gazette piece, destined to become a poster in countless pubs, he produced a “Drinker’s Dictionary” listing 250 or so synonyms for being drunk: “Addled…afflicted…biggy…boozy…busky…buzzey…cherubimical…cracked…halfway to Concord…” Yet he also frightened readers with colorful news accounts of the deaths of drunks, and he wrote editorials on the “poisonous” effect of spirits. As a printer in London, he had lectured coworkers that strong drink made them less industrious; as an editor in Philadelphia, he continued this crusade.21

  Franklin also perfected the art of poking fun at himself. He realized, as have subsequent American humorists, that a bit of wry self-deprecation could make him seem more endearing. In one small item in the Gazette, he recounted how “a certain printer” was walking along the wharf when he slipped and stuck his leg into a barrel of tar. His awkward escape resembled the saying about being “as nimble as a bee in a tarbarrel.” Franklin ended the item with a little play on words: “ ’Tis true he was no Honey Bee, nor yet a Humble Bee, but a Boo-bee he may be allowed to be, namely B.F.”22

  By the early 1730s, Franklin’s business was thriving. He started building an extended little empire by sending his young workers, once they had served their time with him, to set up partnership shops in places ranging from Charleston to Hartford. He would supply the presses and part of the expenses, as well as some content for the publications, and in return take a portion of the revenue.

  A Practical Marriage

  Now that he had established himself in business, Franklin found himself in want of a good wife. Bachelorhood was frowned on in colonial America, and Franklin had a sexual appetite that he knew required discipline. So he set out to find himself a mate, preferably one with a dowry attached.

  Boarding at his house was a friend from the Junto, glazier and mathematician Thomas Godfrey, and his wife, who tended to their meals and homemaking. Mrs. Godfrey proposed a match with one of her nieces, whom Franklin found “very deserving,” and a courtship ensued. Dowries being common, Franklin sought to negotiate his through Mrs. Godfrey: approximately £100, the amount he still owed on his printing business. When the girl’s family replied that they could not spare that much, Franklin suggested rather unromantically that they could mortgage their home.

  The girl’s family promptly broke off the relationship, either out of outrage or (as Franklin suspected) in the hope that the courtship had gone so far that they would elope without a dowry. Resentful, Franklin refused to have anything more to do with the girl, even after Mrs. Godfrey suggested they were open to negotiations.

  Not only did the courtship end, so did yet another Franklin friendship. Godfrey moved out, quit the Junto, and eventually turned over the printing of his little almanac to Franklin’s competitor, Bradford. Years later, Franklin wrote dismissively about the man who once shared his house, club, and presumably affection. Godfrey “was not a pleasing companion, as like most great mathematicians I have met with he expected unusual precision in everything said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles to the disturbance of all conversation.”

  Franklin’s annoyance also led him to satirize the situation in the Gazette not long thereafter, using the pseudonym Anthony Afterwit. The “honest tradesman” complains that when he was courting his wife, her father hinted that he could be in for a nice dowry, and he “formed several fine schemes” of how to spend the money. “When the old gentleman saw I was pretty well engaged, and that the match was too far gone to be easily broke off, he…forbid me the house and told his daughter that if she married me he would not give her a farthing.” Afterwit, unlike the real Franklin, elopes. “I have since learned that there are old curmudgeons besides him who have this trick to marry their daughters and yet keep what they might well spare.”

  (The Anthony Afterwit essay had an interesting side effect. His fictional wife, Abigail Afterwit, was the name of a character that had been created almost a decade earlier by Franklin’s estranged brother, James, in the New England Courant. James, who had since moved to Rhode Island, reprinted the Anthony Afterwit piece in his own paper along with a reply from a Patience Teacraft. Benjamin in turn reprinted the reply in his Philadelphia paper, and the following year he visited his brother for an emotional reconciliation. James’s health was failing, and he begged his younger brother to look after his 10-year-old son. That Benjamin did, arranging for his education and taking him on as an appr
entice. A dominant theme in Franklin’s autobiography is that of making mistakes and then making amends, as if he were a moral bookkeeper balancing his accounts. Running away from his brother was, Franklin noted, “one of the first errata of my life.” Helping James’s son was the way to set the ledger back into balance. “Thus it was that I made my brother ample amends for the service I had deprived him of by leaving him so early.”)

  After his courtship of Mrs. Godfrey’s niece was scuttled, Franklin scouted around for other possible brides, but he discovered that young printers were not valued enough to command a sure dowry. He could not expect money unless it was to marry a woman “I should not otherwise think agreeable.” In his autobiography, which he began years later as a letter to the illegitimate son he fathered while looking for a wife, Franklin wrote a memorable line: “In the meantime, that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience.”23

  Deborah Read, the girl who had laughed at him when he first straggled into Philadelphia, was also in a rather desperate situation. After Franklin left her to live in London, she had received only one curt letter from him. So she made the mistake of marrying a charming but unreliable potter named John Rogers. He was unable to make a living, and Deborah soon heard rumors that he had abandoned a wife in England. So she moved back in with her mother, and Rogers stole a slave and absconded to the West Indies, leaving behind a load of debt. Although there were reports he had died there in a brawl, these were unconfirmed, which meant Deborah would have difficulty legally re-marrying. Bigamy was a crime punishable by thirty-nine lashes and life imprisonment.

  Since the death of Deborah’s father, her mother had been eking out a living by selling homemade medicines. An advertising bill, printed by Franklin, notes: “The widow Read…continues to make and sell her well-known ointment for the itch, with which she has cured abundance of people…It also kills or drives away all sorts of lice in once or twice using.” Franklin frequently visited the Reads, advised them on business matters, and took pity on the dejected Deborah. He faulted himself for her plight, though Mrs. Read kindly took most of the blame for not having let them marry before he left for London. Fortunately for all, according to Franklin, “our mutual affection was revived.”

  Around that time, Franklin developed a method for making difficult decisions. “My way is to divide a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro and the other Con,” he later recalled. Then he would list all the arguments on each side and weigh how important each was. “Where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out; if I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three.” By this bookkeeper’s calculus, it became clear to him “where the balance lies.”

  However exactly he came to his decision, the balance of considerations eventually tipped toward Deborah, and in September 1730 they began living together as a married couple. There was no official ceremony. Instead, they entered into a type of common-law arrangement that served to protect them from charges of bigamy if Rogers unexpectedly reappeared. But he never did. Franklin viewed his union with Deborah, like his reconciliation with his brother, as an example of his rectifying an earlier error. “Thus I corrected that great erratum as well as I could,” Franklin later wrote of his mistreatment of the younger Deborah.

  Franklin is often described as (or accused of) being far more practical than romantic, a man of the head rather than heart. The tale of his common-law marriage to Deborah provides some support for this view. But it also illustrates some complexities of Franklin’s character: his desire to tame his hard-to-govern passions by being practical, and the genuine fondness he felt for kindred companions. He was not given to starry-eyed soulful commitments or poetic love; instead, his emotional attachments tended to be the more prosaic bonds of affection that grew out of partnership, self-interest, collaboration, camaraderie, and good-humored kinship.

  A wife who brought with her a dowry would have likely also brought expensive social airs and aspirations. Instead, Franklin found “a good and faithful helpmate” who was frugal and practical and devoid of pretensions, traits that he later noted were far more valuable to a rising tradesman. Their union remained mutually useful, if not deeply romantic, until Deborah’s death forty-four years later. As Franklin would soon have Poor Richard pronounce in his almanac: “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”24

  William

  There was one major complication facing the new marriage. Around that time, Franklin fathered and took sole custody of an illegitimate son named William, which was probably the “great inconvenience” that he coldly wrote in his autobiography was the result of consorting with “low women.”

  The identity of William’s mother is one of history’s delicious mysteries, a source of speculation among scholars. Franklin never revealed the secret, nor did William, if he knew. In fact, even the date of his birth is unclear. Let’s start there.

  Most historians say that William was born sometime between April 12, 1730, and April 12, 1731. This is based on a letter Franklin wrote to his own mother on April 12, 1750, referring to William as “now 19 years of age, a tall, proper youth, and much of a beau.”

  Willard Sterne Randall in A Little Revenge, a fascinating but somewhat speculative account of Franklin’s troubled relationship with his son, questions this. In September 1746, William left home with an ensign’s commission on a military expedition to Canada, and Randall argues that he was unlikely to have been only 15 or 16. Perhaps, in writing his mother, Franklin was shaving a year or two off William’s age to make him seem legitimate. Likewise, the meticulous Franklin scholar J. A. Leo Lemay, on his Web site detailing Franklin’s life, surmises he was born in 1728 or 1729, as do some nineteenth-century biographers.

  However, we know that before he was allowed to enlist, perhaps sometime in early 1746, William tried to run away to sea, and his father had to fetch him home from a ship in the harbor, which indicates that he indeed might have been not any older than 15 or 16 at the time (his father had considered running off to sea at age 12, and did run away to Philadelphia at 17). Sheila Skemp’s comprehensive biography of William makes it seem quite logical that he embarked with the military at 16, well after he finished his schooling. In addition, William was responsible for the belief reported in a magazine that he was 82 when he died in 1813 (which would place his birth in late 1730 or early 1731).

  On balance, because neither man ever denied William’s illegitimacy, it makes sense to believe that Franklin was telling the truth to his mother when he referred to William’s age, and it makes equal sense to believe that William was never (intentionally or not) misleading about his age. Based on these assumptions, it is likely that William was born around the time that Deborah began living with Franklin in late 1730.25

  That being the case, might Deborah actually have been his mother, as some scholars speculate? Might the common-law marriage have been partly occasioned by her pregnancy, while William’s origin was left murky in case Rogers reappeared and charged her with bigamy and adultery? As Carl Van Doren muses, “There was bound to be a scandal. But of course it would be less if the child appeared to be Franklin’s and an unknown mother’s. The lusty philosopher could take all the blame.”

  But this theory doesn’t bear much scrutiny. If Deborah had been pregnant and given birth, there would surely be some friends and relatives, including her mother, who would have known. As H. W. Brands puts it, “Even after the passage of years precluded any further concerns about Rogers, Debbie declined to claim William as her own—an omission impossible to imagine in any mother, let alone one who had to watch from close at hand while her son spent his life labeled a bastard.” On the contrary, she was openly hostile to him. According to a clerk who later worked for the Franklins, Deborah referred to William as “the greatest villain upon earth” and heaped upon him “invective
s in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.”26

  During a heated election in 1764, William’s paternity became an issue. One abusive pamphlet charged that he was the son of a prostitute named Barbara who was subsequently exploited by the Franklins as a maid until she died and was buried in an unmarked grave. Given the scurrilous nature of that campaign and the unlikelihood that any of the Franklins could have abided having William’s real mother around as their maid, this also seems implausible.

  The best explanation comes from a 1763 letter about William, rediscovered more than two centuries later, which was written by George Roberts, a prosperous Philadelphia merchant who was a close family friend. “ ’Tis generally known here his birth is illegitimate and his mother not in good circumstances,” Roberts wrote to a friend in London, “but the report of her begging bread in the streets of this city is without the least foundation in truth. I understand some small provision is made by him for her, but her being none of the most agreeable women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.” As Roberts was probably in a position to know, and as he had no ulterior motive, we are left with this as the likeliest scenario.27

  A Frugal Mate

  In his autobiography (which extols the virtues of “industry” and “frugality” a total of thirty-six times), Franklin wrote of his wife, “It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself.” He gives her even more credit in a letter written later, near the end of his life: “Frugality is an enriching virtue, a virtue I could never acquire in myself, but I was lucky enough to find it in a wife, who thereby became a fortune to me.” For Franklin, this passed for true love. Deborah helped at the print shop, stitched pamphlets, and purchased rags for papermaking. At least initially, they had no servants, and Franklin ate his bread-and-milk porridge each morning from a twopenny bowl.